Top Rated Plus is the highest of Upwork's standard talent badges, awarded automatically to Top Rated freelancers and agencies that also show substantial recent earnings, including work on a large contract, in the past twelve months.
The badge sits above Top Rated and below the invitation-only Expert-Vetted tier. Upwork grants and removes it automatically: a profile must keep meeting the Top Rated criteria, a Job Success Score of 90% or higher, a complete profile, enough history and no recent account holds, and on top of that show strong earnings in the trailing twelve months, with at least one large or long-running contract completed without a bad outcome. Upwork publishes the current requirements in its Help Center and adjusts them from time to time.
What it buys is visibility and trust. Top Rated Plus profiles are surfaced to larger clients and Enterprise buyers, get priority support, and carry a badge that clients recognise before they read a word of the profile. For an agency the badge is held by the agency account itself and depends on the agency's own score and earnings, not on the badges of its members.
It is also fragile: a single contract that ends badly can drop the score under 90% and the badge goes with it at the next fortnightly review, which is why agencies at this tier are careful about which contracts they accept.
How Upwork Insights uses it
1,131 of the 25,139 agencies in the index hold Top Rated Plus as of Oct 30, 2026, which is 4.5%; a further 1,066 are Top Rated. The stat page breaks the count down by category, and the ranking can be filtered to badge holders.
The badge is read from each agency's public page at observation time. In the Index Score it is the trust component: Top Rated Plus scores 1.0 of the 15 available points, Top Rated 0.7, and Expert-Vetted adds 0.3, capped.